According to Microsoft Watch, Internet Explorer 7 will handle PNG Transparency. Not sure what their source is—it isn’t IEBlog—but if true, it’ll be very nice. Now we only have to wait another 5 years for everyone to upgrade or switch, and web designers will be able to make use of a very simple, but very useful effect in our normal layouts instead of only in the enhanced versions.
(via CNET Extra)
Talk about convoluted. Someone has developed a Java applet that will use one browser to install spyware on another. The applet runs in any browser using the Sun Java Runtime Environment—Firefox, Opera, Mozilla, etc.—and if it can convince you to run the installer, it will install spyware on Internet Explorer. And since you can’t remove Internet Explorer from Windows (you can hide it, but it’s always there…waiting), just using an alternative browser isn’t enough to protect you.
Of course, the obvious solution here is don’t let it install anything. That’s what the Java sandbox is for, after all: applets run in their own little world and can’t touch the rest of your system unless you let them (or they find a hole in the sandbox, which is why you need to keep Java up to date—just like everything else).
Time to emphasize the fact that while Firefox is still safer than IE, it’s not a magic bullet. There is no magic bullet. You can minimize risk, but never eliminate it.
I installed the just-released Netscape 8 Beta. It imported most of my settings from Firefox, including bookmarks, cookies and even history. One of the first things I always check with a new browser is how it identifies itself, which in this case is as Firefox 0.9.6. (Presumably they’ll get on this by the time the final version is out.)
First impressions: importing was clean and worked well. UI is a bit freaky, as things are spread all over the place—like the main menu, which is in the upper right and in line with the title bar instead of where the menus are on every other Windows application. The multiple toolbars seem confusing at first (it took a while to dig up my bookmark bar, for instance). Then I looked at the site trust/rendering choices, the big exciting feature of this release. And I’m not impressed. Or rather I am, but not favorably.
The current tab shows a shield icon indicating the trust level of the site: Green if it’s been verified by a “Netscape Security Partner,” yellow if not, and I would presume red if it’s a known phishing/virus/etc. site. There’s also an icon indicating the trust level: a check mark if it’s trusted, an ellipsis for “not sure” and an exclamation point for not trusted. Unverified sites are, by default, in the “not sure” category. So far this makes sense.
Clicking on the shield icon opens a site controls dialog box enabling you to choose to what extent you trust the website, and below that, whether to display the site using the Mozilla Netscape or Internet Explorer engine: Continue reading
As reported all over the place, Microsoft has reversed its previous plans and will be releasing a new beta of Internet Explorer this summer instead of keeping it locked to the next version of Windows.
About frelling time.
Of course, there’s no word on whether they’ll actually improve page rendering—all the statements so far have focused on security, anti-phishing, and the like—so we web developers will probably have to continue using hacks to work around buggy rendering and missing features that are so much easier to build for Firefox, Opera and Safari. And even if they do fix things in IE7, they’re focusing on Windows XP (we might get it in Windows 2000, if we’re lucky), and there are still people using on Windows 98/Me who will still be stuck with IE6.
Of course, unlike Microsoft, Mozilla hasn’t stopped working on their browsers. By the time IE7 is out, Firefox 1.1 or 1.5 will be available, and they may be well on the road to 2.0.
Congratulations to Mozilla and Firefox for convincing Microsoft to get back to work!
Competition is good.
Firefox is clearly on the rise, with some sites seeing as much as a 30% drop in traffic from IE (via gemal.dk). Robin Good’s collection of sites shows Firefox at 20%, Netscape at 8%, IE 6 at under 60%, and older versions of IE chugging along at low levels.
W3Schools shows a slightly more sober 17.5% Firefox, 65.1% IE 6, with IE 5 weighing in at 4.6% to give IE a total market share of just under 70%.
Stats on Hyperborea.org show just 12.6% Firefox and 78.5% IE (73% IE6, 5.5% IE5), with Mozilla taking up most of the slack.
Why the differences? Continue reading
